Dispatches from the intersection of poetry and social change by D.C.-based poet and co-director of Split This Rock Poetry Festival

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Oliver Cromwell's 1653 address dissolving the Rump Parliament

Without comment, I bring you Oliver Cromwell:

It is high time for Me to put an End to your Sitting in this Place, which you have dishonoured by your Contempt of all Virtue, and defiled by your Practice of every Vice;

Ye are a factious Crew and Enemies of all good Government; Ye are a Pack of mercenary Wretches and would, like Esau, Sell your Country for a Mess of Pottage; and like Judas, betray your God for a few Pieces of Money; Is there a single Virtue now remaining amongst you?

Is there one Vice that you do not possess? Ye have no more Religion than my horse! Gold is your God: Which of you have not bartered your Conscience for Bribes?

Is there a Man amongst you that has the least care for the Good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes! Have you not defiled this Sacred Place, and turned the Lord's Temple into a Den of Thieves by your immoral Principles and wicked Practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole Nation.

Your Country therefore calls upon me to cleanse the Augean Stable, by putting a final Period to your Iniquitous Proceedings in this House, and which by God's Help, and the strength He has given Me, I now come to do.

I command ye, therefore, upon the Peril of your Lives, to depart immediately out of this Place; Go! Get out! Make haste, ye Venal Slaves, begone!

About Me

I am coeditor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology and coordinator of the group of the same name, which has been active since the first national day of poetry against the war, February 12, 2003. We produced Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in March 2008.
My first book of poems, Whiskey in the Garden of Eden, was published by The Word Works in 2007 and I host Sunday Kind of Love at Busboys and Poets DC. In 2005 I received a D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities Individual Artist Grant and the People Before Profits Poetry Prize.